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Well, good afternoon again.
Some of you I spoke informally but I would like to say
good afternoon to you.
I'd like to read a quote to you to start our afternoon session
and then I am going to turn it over to Dr. Nilsen.
It's a quote and I love quotes.
It's by Callie Kilburn.
It says, "Knowledge and understanding are life's faith
companions who will never be untrue to you, for knowledge
is your crown and understanding your staff and when they are
with you, you can possess no greater treasures."
Today, you have a few of our campus treasures who are
with you to share information from their areas to assist you
in navigating in the academy.
You will leave informed, improved, and renewed.
I want you today to help me welcome Dr. Nilsen who is our
vice-president of External Relations and she is going
to share with you core values and some things that you
can take away as you navigate in the academy.
Help me welcome Dr. Nilsen.
[audience applause].
I need this, can I just talk?
I need this?
I can't use both of my hands.
Thank you for allowing me to come and spend just
a few minutes with you today to talk about Eastern's core values
and how we identify them and what that means to you
as brand new faculty.
I'm really glad you are here and apart of Eastern's family.
I've had the wonderful opportunity to be at Eastern now
for 31 years.
This is my 32nd year at the university and it has been a
great place to live and grow up and have a professional career.
I hope that you will be here and be apart of Eastern's family
also for a very long time.
Each of you made a conscious decision, I think,
to come to Eastern.
When you left your previous place of employment
or when you left grad school or wherever you are coming from
to Charleston, Illinois.
I guess I kind of want to start and ask you why.
What brought you to Eastern?
What is it about Eastern that attracted you as a place to live
and grow and work.
Okay.
(male speaker). Well, I was a student here
in the master's program 13 years ago and still kind of new
to campus and bit of a number of different faculty positions.
My wife is employed here, so it was good to come home.
(Dr. Nilsen). You're coming home.
Okay, who else.
(male speaker). To be honest,
I didn't know much about the place, but I thought
it was a great position.
So I was looking forward to the opportunity
for me, professionally.
(Dr. Nilsen). Good.
(female speaker). Also, I am Eastern alumni
and have taught in adjunct for several years and there is
a quality of people that I will be involved with.
It's just a great opportunity.
(Dr. Nilsen). That's good.
I serve on the university marketing committee
and the members of that committee in 2003 decided
we needed to have a better idea about why students choose us
as an institution of higher education, why faculty choose
to work here, why alumni come back, why donors give,
why legislators support.
So we decided to do some surveying with a task force
to try to identify what is it about Eastern that makes us
somewhat special.
So, in my low-tech presentation, the first handout,
the first page, we developed a marketing task force.
This was composed of 11 people from throughout the campus.
So we went from Academic Affairs, Student Affairs,
Business Affairs, External Relations,
and put people together.
And what we did is that we looked at a lot of research.
We looked at surveys and data and outcome measures to try
to identify what makes Eastern special or how we are perceived
by other audiences.
And you'll find that in the second page that after we finish
looking at the research, we found that it told us that
Eastern is viewed positively by its students, that we live up to
our reputation for fostering strong relationships among
students, faculty, and staff.
That we are perceived as providing a high quality
education and that our affordability, size,
and location, historically, have been viewed as
our other strengths.
That was back in 2003.
Just this past summer, if you flip over to the next page,
we went back to revisit those four key messages to see
are we still living up to our reputation.
You can look at our four areas and all of the data that
we found to support those four areas.
For the first one, Eastern is used positively by its students.
If you look under the 2004, 2007 graduate school exit, 93% of our
students were satisfied with their graduate program.
Under the IBHE alumni survey, 82% were positive or strongly
positive about Eastern and at least 97% were at least somewhat
positive about the university.
Under the resident satisfaction survey, 93% of our students said
they enjoyed living in the residence halls.
Our adult students, 96% they would choose Eastern again.
And down under the undergraduate student survey
with 7500 students being surveyed, 93% agree that their
overall experience at Eastern have been positive.
So when we say that we are viewed positively,
we have the data to back it up.
If you go over to the next page and you look at
the second statement, EIU lives up to its reputation for
fostering relationships among students, faculty, and staff.
Again, there is lots of evidence to support that statement.
Ninety-three percent of graduate students agree that their
graduate program fostered an intellectual
professional community.
Eighty-nine percent of undergraduates in the IBHE
alumni survey indicated that their professors were accessable
often or very often, 99% indicate that they were
accessible at least sometimes.
If you flip over to the next page, under the undergraduate
student survey, all three of those data points
are very strong.
Again, with 7500 students, that's a very large end,
77% were satisfied with the opportunities to work
with faculty, 93% were satisfied by opportunities to work
collaboratively with other students and 90% agree that
there were ample opportunities to interact socially.
EIU is perceived as providing high quality education again
under the IBHE survey with 800 respondants, 86% were employed
within a year of graduation.
Ninety-three percent of students in the graduate school
were satisfied with their program reputation and again,
looking under that undergraduate student survey
with 7500 students responding, if you look at those data points
they are very, very strong about our academic reputation
and the kind of educational opportunities provided to
students when they were here in school.
Then, if you look over just one more page at our last one.
Historically, EIU's affordability, size,
and location can be viewed as other strengths and our adult
student survey, 98% indicated that they selected EIU because
of the availability of classes.
And that was it on that one.
So what does that mean?
Once we decided where we were and how we were perceived
by our students, we decided that our goal was
to tell Eastern's story.
That is, on the next page, our story.
These are our seven marketing messages, our core values,
that we incorporate in all of our publications and our website
in our speeches, in our audio and video and presentations.
That is, these are our stories.
That we have a strong academic reputation, that we provide
close interpersonal relationships with our faculty,
with our staff, and with our students.
We have ample opportunities for personal and professional
growth, both for faculty and students.
That we have small classes on our campus.
In fact, our average class size here is 22.
I have two children who attend another university.
My second son is in his sophomore year.
There isn't one of his classes that is under 200 students.
We don't have that here.
That is not our history here at Eastern.
We actually have that close interaction.
We have tenured and tenure- tract faculty in the classroom.
We have tenured faculty teaching freshmen classes.
We have tenured-tract faculty teaching any level of classes.
That is so special for a school like this that our students have
that kind of accessibility to you as their faculty members.
That our students have a positive
undergraduate experience.
They like it here.
Once they are students, they stay here.
We have a very high retention level from freshmen to sophomore
year and our graduation rate is only third in the state.
In fact, it's U of I and ISU.
ISU is just a fraction of a point ahead of us and we are
right behind them.
We have very satisfied alumni.
One of the joys in my job is I get to travel all over the
country and I meet alumni from graduation dates back in
the 1940s and 1930s to the 2000s and I hear the same message
no matter where I go that they had a wonderful experience here,
that they had close relationships
with their faculty.
They keep in touch with their fellow students and so that is
a tradition of excellence here at Eastern Illinois University.